Sunday, June 16, 2019

Get on with it …

… You Had One Job | Anne Kennedy. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

The task for the preacher, bent over a stack of books all week, troubling out the Greek and Hebrew, making sure about context and authorial intent, researching ancient assumptions and habits, taking all the words apart grammatically and then carefully stringing them all back together again, is to know, certainly and truly, both what it says and what it means. If that one doesn’t know what it says, and then doesn’t know what it means … then the pulpit ought to remain empty for the morning and everyone should just keep scrolling through twitter.

1 comment:

  1. This resembles not at all what I infer to be the practice among Catholic priests. Over the years, I have heard a few good homilists, some bad ones, and the great bulk of them simply forgettable. Within the last several months I have heard one of the good ones mention points of Greek philology twice--the aorist tense the first time, the verbs agapo and philo the second. These were probably at most the third and fourth times I have heard any such thing. But of course one doesn't attend Mass for the homily.

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